After effects CC 2020: Missing user presets folder

[Guest]

Hi! 

I got accepted into a ae giveaway that had some presets. I had downloaded them and saved them to the “user presets” folder. I went to after effects to search for the user presets folder, but it wasn’t there. The whole file has seemed to disappear from ae. I was told to make a new folder on the program, name it user presets and save everything that was in the other file to the new one. But I can’t seem to figure out how to do that either. 

[Rick Gerard]

Directly from the help files:

• The animation presets that are installed with After Effects are in the Presets folder located in the Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects CC\Support Files (Windows) or Applications/Adobe After Effects CC (Mac OS) folder.
• Animation presets that you create are saved by default in the Presets folder located in
  My Documents\Adobe\After Effects CC (Windows) or Documents/Adobe/After Effects CC (Mac OS).

If you don't have this file structure then the Animation Presets Panel cannot find any animation presets you may have saved. 

The location of the last animation preset that you used can be found if you go to the Animation>Apply Animation Preset menu. The finder will open up and show you where the file is. If you have not applied the animation preset you are looking for you can do a search of your hard drive looking for either .ffx files or the file name of the animation preset you are looking for. Fix the folder structure and re-launch AE and you should be able to see them in the Effects and Presets panel. Here's mine (Mac) showing the folder structure inside the Documents/Adobe folder and the proper names for the folders.

This is what my Effects and Presets panel looks like. I have more than 200 that I have made and a bunch that I have purchased. 

(note: someone with a sharp eye will see that my User Preset Library folder is an alias. I actually have it pointed to a Dropbox folder so that no matter where I go or what machine I am working on, I can have access to my presets. You could also create an alias and save your custom AE presets in a Creative Cloud folder so all of your machines would always have access to all of your presets.)

[Massayt]

Hi guys so this is not a reply but idk how to post stuff but I really need help, I downloaded AE cc 2020 yesterday and I'm aware how to use most of the buttons and stuff but before I got it I joined a giveaway that had one preset I really liked, so I want to use the preset on ae, so I made my preset folder and then I pressed the preset so it would open in ae and work, but ae gave me an error code telling me it doesn't work. And that happens every time I try to use any preset. Does anyone know how to fix this? If you do I could really use some help ❤️

[Rick Gerard]

Are you selecting a layer, then using the effects and presets panel to drag the preset to the layer, or double-click with the layer selected. 

If you are still getting an error message, please embed a screenshot that shows your entire UI and all of the things you have done to the layers. 

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